Courting

“It’s all in English.”

“Yeah. It’s an American restaurant.”

Ayasa was scanning over the menu, reading it again and again- utterly lost.

“You can’t read it?”

“No.”

I wasn’t that good at English, but I was probably better than most people in my class. Good enough at least to pretend like I understood poetry. The menu was in English, or at least some attempt at it by someone who could write it about as well as I could read it. “Bacon Burger” wasn’t that hard for someone to sound out. The brightly composed pictures of the food were usually enough for those that couldn’t.

Ayasa was struggling with this on a more fundamental level. It was understandable that she didn’t know a word of English- after all, kids in the North probably learned Russian instead. Ayasa looked like she was struggling to understand the very concept of a Hamburger.

“Which one?”

“You’re asking me?”

I wasn’t that hungry, and the food here was far more expensive than it had any right to be- 1600 yen for a full meal set. You could get the same thing elsewhere for less than half that.

“Nuggets, I think. I’m not too hungry.”

Last night’s ordeal had sucked all the appetite out of me, apparently.

“What is a nugget?”

I guess American-style fast food hadn’t permeated into the North at all. Too decadent and capitalistic for Uncle Yoshi.

“A little ball of fried chicken in bread.”

“Like karaage?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Ok, so the concept of fast food wasn’t completely foreign to her.

“What about that one?”

She was pointing at the bacon cheeseburger which the restaurant considered its signature.

“It’s a cheeseburger. With bacon.”

Ayasa waited for me to explain further. Really? How do you explain a bacon cheeseburger to someone?

“It’s a sandwich made with a beef patty and cheese. They also put fried strips of pork in it.”

That was possibly the most clinical and unappetizing description of a bacon cheeseburger I could have possibly mustered.

“That sounds very expensive.”

Oh, it was expensive. I mean, relative to a fancy restaurant it was cheap, but even for a fast food place trying to seem upscale the burgers were just above an acceptable price threshold.

“Don’t worry about it. I can cover it.”

I could cover a meal for both of us here and still have maybe 2000 yen left over. If that got depleted too, I’d have to start pulling money out of my savings. That meant going home with Ayasa. That probably wasn’t a smart move.

“Ok. That is what I will order…where is the waiter?”

“Huh? There’s no waiter. You go up to the counter to order.”

“And this is called a restaurant? What kind of restaurant does not have waiters?”

Ayasa’s Northern manner of speaking sometimes produced some really weird-sounding sentences. Maybe that was why she was so reticent before- the only phrases that she could make sound natural to a Southerner were curt statements and one-word answers. What kind of experience did she have with restaurants that she would assume they all had waiters?

“On second thought, let me do the ordering. For now.”

We found a secluded table tucked into a corner at the end of the food court. The light had gone out above, leaving only the filtration of natural light from the big windows to light the table. We stood out less that way.

Ayasa had gone ahead with the most expensive bacon cheeseburger set on the menu. I chose to forgo a meal set but ordered some nuggets for appearance’s sake. I had learned the hard way dating Miho that it was bad date etiquette to let your date be the only one eating- not that this was supposed to be a date.

Still, we were doing normal date stuff. If we didn’t want to attract too much attention, then acting like a couple on an awkward date would probably get people to turn their eyes away in empathetic pity. What was the harm in that?

“You eat this every day?”

Ayasa had taken bite from the burger after carefully studying the best way of attacking it. The sensation must have been a bit overwhelming, as she hadn’t been able to take another one.

“Me? No. I’d get fat if I ate a burger like that every day.”

Fat and poor. That was probably the wrong thing to say on a date, even with the qualifier I had put on there. Miho would have leapt across the table to smack me for saying something that insensitive, but Ayasa didn’t seem to take it the wrong way.

“I thought that people eat these all the time here.”

“Well, some people do. But it’s not really healthy if you eat it all the time.”

Ayasa had one really weird view of Southern culinary habits. She took another bite of the burger. It was still a little too much for her.

“How can someone afford to eat this all the time?”

Beats me. I certainly couldn’t.

“There are cheaper ones.”

“Are they as…”

Ayasa struggled to find a word.

“...excessive as this?”

“No. That one’s a bit of a special case.”

Ayasa looked at me with an expression I’d never seen on her face before- sheepish and unsure, like she had just pitched a baseball through my window and broken a priceless vase or something like that.

“It’s fine. It’s really not that much.”

The conversation died down. Ayasa continued to take chunks out of the burger, but couldn’t bring herself to eat more than a little bite at a time. I rationed out the nuggets to match her pace. I was wasting a golden opportunity.

“Um, Higashiyama?”

Ayasa turned her eyes towards me to indicate she was listening, but took another bite.

“Why were you at that rave last night?”

That seemed like a bad way to open. Why wouldn’t she be at that rave? I didn’t really know what she was like. The idea that she wouldn’t be the kind of person to go there was a creation of my imagination.

“Rave? What is rave?”

“Uhm, like the dancing-”

“Oh. You mean the disco.”

Silly me, I thought disco had been dead for a long time.

“Yeah. The disco. It didn’t really seem like you were into dancing there.”

She had been checked out from the dance floor until she tried to pull me into it.

“I go to listen to music. Why else would you go to a Disco?”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“But isn’t it illegal?”

Ayasa looked puzzled.

“Why would it be illegal to listen to music?”

“All those police showed up.”

I was under the assumption that the raid we had narrowly escaped was targeting the illegal underground rave for being some kind of counter-cultural resistance movement.

“I don’t know why the police came. I guess it’s technically not allowed to play that kind of music, but they usually don’t bother if people aren’t doing it on the street.”

So it was illegal, but poorly enforced.

“Did you go there a lot?”

“No. Just once before.”

“Why not just listen to music at home?”

Ayasa scowled.

“How? With what?”

On your phone was what I was about to answer, but that would have been stupid. A smartphone was something she clearly didn’t have access to.

“Only the Wezzigen kids have stuff like CD players or pocket radios that work on the Southern frequencies. I thought you were one of them.”

There was that word again. Ayasa must not have been Wezziegen.

“Besides-”

She was looking down at her plate. The burger was about half-finished.

“- having that stuff at home isn’t a good idea. For me.”

Home.

That word hit me hard. Ayasa still had no way home, thanks to my carelessness.

“Listen, about getting you home-”

Why did I bring that up? I still had no plan. That was just rubbing salt in the wound.

Ayasa perked up.

“-uh, sorry. I’m still working on a plan.”

“It’s fine.”

I didn’t know how to answer that. This was fine?

“Oh. Okay.”

Ayasa took a larger bite out of the burger. She must have overcome its power. I popped the last nugget in my mouth. Now what?

“Higashiyama- you like pop music, right?”

“Yes. I just said so.”

Ayasa didn’t seem to understand that I was leading into proposing something. She seemed to think I was just an idiot confirming something already obvious.

“Have you ever tried karaoke?”